Annette Funicello, Mickey Mouse Club Star, Dead at 70

Annette Funicello, the former star of “The Mickey Mouse Club,” is dead at the age of 70.

Funicello was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1987 and soon after became a spokesperson for research into the treatment of the disease, which attacks the central nervous system. She died at Mercy Southwest Hospital in Bakersfield, Walt Disney Co. spokesman Howard Green said.

Funicello popped–literally popped, sideways and smiling—onto black and white living room screens, mouse ears firmly attached, announcing her name: Annette! (In block letters, it was displayed on her t-shirt, just in case, mid-show, you forgot.)

The most popular Mouseketeer in the original 1950s “Mickey Mouse Club” cast, Funicello was soon receiving 6,000 fan letters a month. Boys drooled over her. Girls rooted for her. And until her death on Monday, following a more than 20-year battle with multiple sclerosis, Annette remained swathed in innocence, untainted by scandal, a Disney star incapable of blemishing the brand.

Born in Utica, N.Y., Annette moved with her Italian-American parents to Los Angeles at age four. She was reportedly enrolled in dance classes to cure her shyness—and indeed, a shadow of insecurity always moved behind that sweet face. Discovered by Walt Disney himself–when she was dancing the lead in a local recital of “Swan Lake”—she was soon spun off into a Mouse Club serial, “Walt Disney Presents: Annette.”

Look at “Annette” today and you’ll see the seeds of Disney’s mega-franchise, “High School Musical,” and a whisper of Tina Fey’s 2004 feature, “Mean Girls,” as guileless, black-browed Annette, in full skirts and natural bouffant, stands her 5’2” ground against Old South High’s biggest snob. After a lively game of spin the bottle at a backyard party, she wistfully sings “How Will I Know My Love”—a tune reprised on a hayride in a subsequent episode.

Mean Girl Laura Rogan (Roberta Shore) might sneer, but Annette, in character and offstage, got the last laugh: The song launched a recording career that would produce four Top 10 hits, including “Tall Paul,” and Annette’s personal favorite, the Beach Boys-backed “Pineapple Princess.” Phil Spector? Not exactly, but there was an “Annette sound,” achieved, she later explained, by singing back “to my own voice, as exactly as I could.” (“My voice is very small,” she added, “and a range of about three notes.”) In 1959, she recorded “It’s Really Love,” a Paul Anka ditty that would, bizarrely, morph into Johnny Carson’s “Tonight” show theme.

Everett

Annette Funicello in “Beach Party” (1963).

All this was happening while, in an alternative universe, Elvis rocked, Chuck Berry duck-walked and Jerry Lee crossed state lines with his underage bride. Annette’s rebellion never went beyond displaying a bit of a belly button in the series of six “Beach Party” movies she made with her lifelong friend, Frankie Avalon. Because by the ‘60s, the Disney darling had developed…well, let’s just say she developed quite a bit.

“There were never any nude pictures of Annette,” I said to a friend following the internet release of Vanessa Hutchins’ naked snaps.

“No,” he said, “and that would have been something, because she had quite a lot to reveal.”

Like a Norman Rockwell painting—or a Disney fairy tale—Annette continued her clean-cut path, even finding it difficult to publish her memoirs because her life was so tame. She married agent Jack Gilardi in 1965, and the pair had three children before a quiet divorce. (The kids would provide a backdrop to her Skippy peanut butter commercials, back in the days when peanuts didn’t kill.) In 1986 she married horse breeder Glen Holt, and reunited with Avalon for a Beach Party sequel and tour.

It was while filming “Back to the Beach” in 1987 that Annette first noticed the symptoms: Getting up, she had trouble gaining her footing in the sand. Rumors that she had a drinking problem—the star was spotted, wobbly, leaving a restaurant—finally led her to reveal her diagnosis in 1992. And with this bit of drama—unasked for, undeserved—Annette’s life story was suddenly saleable. Her autobiography, “A Dream is A Wish Your Heart Makes,” its title taken from a Disney “Cinderella” song, was published in 1994; Eva La Rue played Annette in the top-rated TV movie the following year.

In the next decade, first leaning on a cane, then requiring a wheelchair, her vision fading by the day, Annette, by all accounts, never lost her hopeful spirit and gentle grace. “I didn’t go public for a long time,” she told People in 1992, “because I believed people wanted to think that nothing bad ever happens to Annette.”